[rtchau]

I have: 1. An old i3 running TrueNAS after I decided my QNAP TS-503 was too old and shonky to be able to run Plex; 2. An ex-govt i5-6500 with 32GB RAM for miscellaneous development activities; 3. An RPi 4 that runs prometheus/grafana for monitoring; 4. A Khadas Vim3 that currently runs some crypto-related analytics, but is mostly for fun/experimentation; 5. A 2015 Macbook (12") that's been gutted all the way down to the logic board, with a combination power/ethernet dongle hanging off it, running Linux as a headless machine for more mucking around/non-serious stuff; 6. A work-issued Macbook Pro (M1 Pro); 7. A Windows desktop with a Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, a 2Tb nvme and a 1660Ti for gaming; 8. Aforementioned QNAP TS-503 gathering dust.

If I'd change anything, I'd turn the Khadas into a media PC and plug it into my TV and retire my broken old AppleTV (some older generation that doesn't allow installing apps), I'll inherit my wife's 12" Macbook and add wire it up the same way as the other one, and then get rid of the i5 and bring the power consumption down a bit (the Core M-5 in the 12" Macbook is surprisingly powerful, and with the I/O on the Macbook, it'd beat the i5 hands-down, aside from the RAM limitations). At some point I'd love to build a small cluster of ARM boards when they step up in capability a bit (and when I can find some reasonably priced ones that can support 32GB RAM or more), and then any dev stuff I do can run in minikube or something similar. I'd like to play around with RISC-V at some point too.

For your purposes... I'd recommend a thin formfactor with a decent CPU, 64GB RAM and as much storage as you can stuff into it, then run TrueNAS.